Saturday, October 20, 2012

Magical Review

During our two-a-day practices, my daughter spends a good part of the evening practicing playing through pieces for her Rocky Mountain Strings group as well as reviewing. For the past nine months, she has been overwhelmed with pieces to learn for two different performing groups, Christmas, as well as keeping up with Suzuki - so I haven't enforced review for a long time. One performing group is done for the year, the other is having its final concert next week and all the pieces are learned. I'm finding that she has more time so I instigated another review routine.

I found this chart in Maurer's String Book. It's great because it enforces the most recently learned pieces in Books 4 and 5 and still allows for a little review of the other books - but it's not overwhelming. Hearing my daughter play these review pieces has been magical. In the past year, her tone and technique have skyrocketed and she played these pieces with such quality! I heard the most beautiful Allegro - which was an excellent example for my 4-year-old who is currently learning that piece. Her musicality in the Seitz Concertos (after stumbling through some of the notes since it's been a while) was incredible!

I affirm that REVIEW is an important and essential part of the Suzuki Method. If my daughter didn't review when she was in books 1-4, this review now that she's in book 5 would have just been relearning all the notes. Instead, she's taking pieces she already knows and adding on layer after layer of musicality!

You can download this review chart at The Practice Shoppe. Enjoy!

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